Comment by kalcode
2 days ago
My theory is that it's more boring. Debugging tools got better where those were the ways to work around and get to testing stuff in old console era.
But now game development has much better tooling and SDK kits for a while in consoles. So I suspect there wasn't a need to spend extra development cycle implementing custom debug menus and stuff.
My theory is that cheat codes disappeared when developers discovered that they could have their effects as microtransactions instead, and then they just never came back because, as you say, SDKs are pretty good about not needing them.